Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica review

Lion is no shrinking violet.

Recommendations

Even at Ars Technica, a certain percentage of readers just want to know the bottom line about a new operating system. Is this a good release? Is it worth the price and the hassle of installing it? Excluding the first few dog-slow, feature-poor releases of Mac OS X, the answer to all those questions has always been a resounding "yes." Lion continues this tradition, more than earning its $29 price with a raft of new technologies and a substantially revised interface and suite of bundled applications.

The standard caveats apply about software and hardware compatibility. Don't just run out and upgrade your system as soon as you finish this review. Lion's digital distribution makes hasty upgrades even more likely. Patience! Take a few days—weeks, even—to research all of your favorite applications and make sure they all run fine on Lion. If you're still using some PowerPC applications, don't upgrade until you have replaced them with Intel-native alternatives. And before you upgrade, back up, back up, back up.

Though the Lion name suggests the end of something, the content of the operating system itself clearly marks the start of a new journey. Seemingly emboldened by the success of iOS, Apple has taken a hatchet to decades of conventional wisdom about desktop operating systems.

The same thing happened ten years ago in an even more dramatic fashion when Apple replaced classic Mac OS with Mac OS X. The new operating system changed the rules on the desktop, wedding composited graphics, smooth animation, and photorealistic artwork to a solid Unix foundation. Apple tried to leave all vestiges of its old operating system behind—the platinum appearance, the Apple menu, even the desktop itself—but eventually bowed to some demands of long-time Mac users. Lion's changes will no doubt meet with similar resistance from experienced Mac users, but I suspect Apple will remain unmoved this time around.

In the same way that Mac OS X so clearly showed the rest of the industry what user interfaces would look like in the years to come, Apple's own iOS has now done the same for its decade-old desktop operating system. iOS was less shocking to users because it appeared to come from nothing, and the mobile operating system conventions it defied were ones that nobody liked anyway. The same is not true on the desktop, where users cling like victims of Stockholm syndrome to mechanics that have hurt them time and again.

It may be many years before even half of the applications on a typical Mac behave according to the design principles introduced in Lion. The transition period could be ugly, especially compared to the effortless uniformity of iOS. In the meantime, let Apple's younger platform serve as a lighthouse in the storm. The Mac will always be more capable than its mobile brethren, but that doesn't mean that simple tasks must also be harder on the Mac. Imagine being able to stick a computer neophyte in front of an iMac with the same confidence that you might hand that neophyte an iPad today.

The technical details of Apple's operating system that were once so important that they practically defined its existence (e.g., memory protection, preemptive multitasking) are now taken for granted. Mainstream reviews of software and hardware alike spend far less time pondering technical specifications and implementation details than they did only a few years ago.

This phenomenon extends even to the geekiest among us, those who didn't just skip to the conclusion of this review but actually read the entire thing. Fellow geeks, ask yourselves, do you know the clock speed of the CPU in the device you're reading this on? Do you know how much RAM it has? What about the memory bus speed and width? Now consider what your answers might have been ten years ago.

Over the past decade, better technology has simply reduced the number of things that we need to care about. Lion is better technology. It marks the point where Mac OS X releases stop being defined by what's been added. From now on, Mac OS X should be judged by what's been removed.

John Siracusa / John Siracusa has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Boston University. He has been a Mac user since 1984, a Unix geek since 1993, and is a professional web developer and freelance technology writer.